How To: Change Crontab Editor in macOS

crontab in nano editor on macOS

my crontab in nano editor on macOS

macOS uses nano editor for crontab updates lately, which is not the text editor I particularly like.

With this in mind, I decided to change it. Usually it’s enough to just set the EDITOR variable to something like vim

EDITOR=vim crontab -e

or, even better:

export EDITOR=vim
crontab -e

But this no longer does the trick!

Turns out, you need to set VISUAL variable instead:

export VISUAL=vim
crontab -e

… and see how imediately better (and much more familiar to me) the experience looks:

my crontab in vim editor on macOS

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